Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves

May 2nd, 2011

Luke begins with some audience interactivity. We’ve all got to stand up. Now we learn a few small moves. Put them all together and what have you got? The Thriller dance!

There’s a point to this: his talk is called Mobile Web Design Moves. Small moves can add up to very big things.

But why learn new moves? Well, Mobile changes things:

Mobile web growth and

Mobile is different.

Mobile web growth

A few years ago, Morgan Stanley published a report in which they predicted that somewhere in 2012 more mobile devices would be shipped than PCs. Well, it happened two years earlier than predicted. As Eric Schmitt has said, everything to do with mobile happens faster. There’s been a 20% drop in PC usage, with the slack taken up by tablets and smartphones. But as Luke points out, the term PC—Personal Computer—is actually better suited to a mobile device; the device you have with you on your person. The way we interact online, email, etc., is shifting to mobile devices.

But is all this usage happening in native apps? No, as it turns out. 40% of Twitter’s traffic comes from mobile, of which 78% is from the mobile website. Mobile browser users increased over 300%. What people forget is that growth of native apps also drives growth of mobile web use.

In a nutshell, more people are going to be accessing your websites with a mobile device than with a desktop device. Find one study of mobile usage that doesn’t show exponential growth.

Even if you have native apps, like Gowalla with a client for iOS, Android, Blackbery, etc., people will still post links in your native app and where does that take you? To a browser.

Anyway, it doesn’t have to be either a native app or a mobile web site. You can hedge your bets and do both …so you’re protected if Steve Jobs pulls the rug out from under you.

Mobile is different

When you’re sitting at a computer at home, you’re sitting comfortably with a keyboard, mouse, chair and coffee mug. The mobile experience involves a small screen, short battery life, an inconsistent network, fingers and sensors. This tactile experience makes it intensely personal.

Where do people use these devices? There’s the sterotypical picture of the businessman on the move, walking down the street. But 84% of mobile usage happens at home; watching TV, for example. 74% of people use them standing in line. People use them in the toilet.

What about when people use these devices? All throughout the day, as it happens. That’s quite different to desktop use. iPad users do a lot of reading on the couch in the evening and in bed at night.

Mobile devices have different technical capabilities and limitations and there are also some distinct times and behaviours associated with their usage.

By now you should be convinced: I need new moves!

Organise yourself

Try to understand why someone would pull out their mobile device. What is that device good at? Try to marry that up with your content. Luke breaks down mobile behaviours into these categories:

Lookup/Find — usually location-related.

Explore/Play — often related to reading.

Check in/Status

Edit/Create — email, for example.

Think about organising your structure to fit these tasks. Luke shows a college site that prioritises campus information less than marketing fluff. But you know, this isn’t just about mobile users. That useful information—like a campus map—is useful for everyone, regardless of their device. So if you go through this process of prioritising for mobile, you will also be prioritising for desktop.

Mobile forces you to prioritise. Screen space is tight. Attention is short. Apply the same prioritisation to desktop users.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: content first, navigation second. Give people what they’re looking for first.

Don’t try to port all of your content to mobile. Instead use this as an opportunity to prune your content and get rid of the crap that people aren’t interested in.

What people want to do on mobile is the same as what people want to do on the desktop. For some reason, Yelp only allowed mobile users to point “mini” reviews …at the very time when people are in the place they are reviewing!

Don’t dumb it down for mobile.

Use your head

Content first, navigation second; yes, but navigation is still important. Facebook’s mobile version originally had 13 navigation elements, which is a bit much. YouTube puts the navigation on a different screen. The pro is that this saves screen estate. The con is that you lose context. ESPN’s mobile site has a navigation that you pull down. There’s also navigation at the end of the page. That’s better than what YouTube does: when you get to the end of the page on YouTube, it’s a dead end. One of the challenges with the ESPN site is that the navigation is duplicated (the pull-down nav and the footer nav). A potential solution is to have that nav link at the top point to the navigation at the bottom of the page.

What about fixed position menus? The iPhone has permanent software buttons on screen in the browser, right? But to do fixed positioning on mobile you have to use some hacky JavScript. And even if you get it working, it’s eating up valuable screen real estate. On the Android device, there’s the problem of the proximity to hardware buttons: people will accidentally mis-tap the hardware controls trying to use on-screen navigation anchored to the bottom of the screen.

So don’t just slavishly copy iOS conventions. Don’t put a back button in your site. It makes sense in an app but on a website, the browser provides a back button already.

Take it in

Input is interesting topic on mobile. The traditional advice is to avoid text input on mobile ….and yet billions of text messages are sent every day. So let’s reverse the traditional advice. Let’s encourage people to input on mobile.

The workhorses of input on the web have been checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, etc. Using these standards on mobile means you can type into the device interface features, like the select UI on the iPhone. But the constraints of the smaller screen on a mobile device introduces some challenges even if you use these standard controls. If you make your own interface elements, you can given them touch target sizes.

The stuff that we have to programme for ourselves today will become standard declarative features in the future. That’s already happening with HTML5 input types like date. But even small things can make a big difference. Use input types like url, number, email, etc. to get an appropriate on-screen keyboard on iOS. Make use of new input types and attributes. Every little bit helps.

Input masks—confining what’s allowed in a form field—can be very useful on mobile devices. Right now we have to do it programmatically but again, it should become declarative in the future.

Avoid the gradual reveal, where you format as people are typing but in a different format to what the placeholder text displayed. Beware with placeholder text: people can interpret it as the form field already being filled in. Phrase them as questions if you can.

There’s a lot of really exciting things happening on the input side of things with mobile devices. More and more device APIs and sensors are being exposed.

Ask for it

Input is the way we gather answers from people but we also have to think about how we ask the questions.

Many mobile browsers try to optimise desktop-specific sites to help mobile users by using zoom. In that situation, right-aligned form field labels are problematic: when you zoom in on the form field, you can’t see the label. Top-aligned labels work better …and there are many other advantages to top-aligned labels that Luke has talked about in the past.

Some people are trying to use placeholder text as labels. But the problem there is that as soon as you tap in there, it disappears. Again, watch out when putting labels within input fields: it’s not clear if the form field is already filled in or not.

Make your moves

Here’s an opportunity. Mobile is growing so quickly and it’s all new. Now is our chance to come up with new innovative stuff. This stuff hasn’t been figured out yet. More and more devices are coming online every day and they’ve all got web browsers.

We can push towards natural user interfaces where the content is the user interface. Minor rant: our design processes are more about designing navigation instead of focusing on the content and designing that. It’s a challenge. As Josh Clark put it:

Buttons are a hack.

So make your own moves. Yes, it’s a scary time; there’s so much to learn about, but also also a huge opportunity.

Keep an eye out for Luke’s book from A Book Apart called Mobile First coming out in Summer 2011.